Online Chat for Collaboration and Team Work
February 9th, 2018 by Ammu Nair
Despite threading and advanced searches added to newer versions of email clients, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of email threads that are a mile deep and segregate discussions based on projects.
The implementation of Slack into Contactpoint has helped us to solve this problem by providing a way to organise conversations into what are called “channels”. You can create ‘open channels’ to post company-wide announcements, which are available to all members of the company. More confidential or private messages that need to be exchanged between team members of a particular project can be carried out in ‘private channels’ – this means Slack allows us to create channels for different projects, topics or conversations between certain team members of our organisation. Direct messages offered by Slack, are just quicker, shorter and better alternatives to email messages. We can get a quick message to each other without having to write on sticky notes, or craft a properly structured email.
Slack has also made it quite simple to search for that link to a great resource that someone in your team posted 3 weeks ago! Slack searches can be filtered – which allows you to search only in specific channels, or only in messages from a particular team member – and can be sorted.
File-sharing, one of the basic prerequisites of collaboration, is supported by Slack which allows you to share all kinds of files in a hassle-free manner by drag-and-drop or from Google Drive or DropBox. The shared files can also be searched through or starred as a favourite for later / quicker reference. Paste the link for your Google Drive spreadsheets or DropBox file along with comments, and these files will be in sync and searchable instantly. That brings me to another great feature that makes Slack a one-stop platform for collaboration. Slack can be easily integrated with a large number of apps in the market – yet another way to have all your information in sync, as it allows centralised access to all your notifications. This has greatly reduced our effort and time in switching between different tools and apps, while checking notifications. Apart from Slack’s huge collection of pre-built integrations, Slack has known to be very flexible in allowing you to build your own integrations quite easily, thereby making it advantageous for large organisations as well. Imagine your IT team receiving notifications when a new Zendesk item is created, or your team receiving a notification when your daily web traffic exceeds a certain number of visitors. Pretty cool, isn’t it?
Integration is what catapults Slack into a category all its own. The solution enables you to centralize all your notifications, from sales to tech support, social media and more, into one searchable place where your team can discuss and take action as required. We have built our own integration with Slack so that online chat enquiries from Enudge are immediately pushed to a particular Slack channel, helping the appropriate customer service staff to see the enquiries without delay, and then see the solutions in the same place.
Slack also provides you with a companion – Slackbot – to remind you of a meeting, or even remind your colleague about lunchtime! Whether you have a team member working remotely, or you are working alone, Slack serves as an excellent tool to increase your productivity, by allowing you to schedule reminders, meetings, or even set up video and screen-sharing calls.
With apps for Android, iOS and Windows, all the Contactpoint team are now well-connected, and our messages are with us, no matter where we are!
Slack, is being employed for similar reasons across many large corporations as well as small businesses. For example, Oracle recently introduced Slack organisation-wide. Other tools are available, and in fact we have used other online chat tools for many years prior to implementing Slack. However, with the ease of integration across platforms, and the many add-ons which can be easily installed, Slack has quickly provided many improvements for our organisation and ways of working.
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